Apple has patched a high-profile vulnerability in QuickTime eleven days after the flaw allowed a hacker to publicly hijack a brand new MacBook Pro. The Apple media player is just one of four popular applications suffering from security defects that currently require the urgent attention of those who use them.

Information Commissioner Richard Thomas yesterday told members of the Home Affairs Select Committee on the Surveillance Society that a proliferation of surveillance technologies were being turned on society in the hope of curing its ills - even though the jury was still out on whether it was effective.

Chip maker Nvidia can be seen striding around the graphics arena, arms raised, muscles flexed after giving Intel a mighty thrashing in the first-quarter contest. Nvidia wrested leadership of the desktop graphics market from the chip giant, Jon Peddie Research (JPR) revealed today.

Sony will open its Home to guests this summer, the consumer electronics giant has said. No, we're not talking some tedious Hello-esque celebrity fawn-a-thon, but the Second Life-style alternative world for the PS3.

Defence company Lockheed Martin Corporation has lost its attempt to gain control of a web address currently hosting a site devoted to cannabis paraphernalia. The ruling (pdf) on the .co.uk domain was an appeal from an earlier ruling.

True believers and Golden Palace Casino take note: we have just received news that Our Lord has manifested himself in a four-gig Samsung Flash memory chip - complete with beard and ethereal "flower petal halo" effect.

Those wacky boffins at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have outdone themselves. The US military researchers are engaged in an effort to produce "soldier portable" digital imaging systems which can pick out "vehicle and dismount" threats 1-10 km away over a 120-degree or greater field of view, by scanning the user's brain.

The next generation of DJs are forsaking traditional 12-inchers in favour of digital means to create their sounds. If you think today's tunes could benefit from some seasoned samples, or even if you want to transfer your vintage vinyl to a digital music player, then this could be a worthwhile investment.

"More than half of new notebooks to use Flash drives by Q4 2009," shouts the headline on market watcher iSuppli's latest missive, before admitting soon after that, actually, it's counting not just solid-state drives but also regular HDDs with integrated Flash cache and separate caches like Intel's Turbo Memory module.

An American architect has come up with a scheme, now picked up on Slashdot, to harvest the wind generated by fast-moving motor vehicles and use it to power a light-rail network running alongside the highway.

O2 has shown is second XDA smart phone to be made by Taiwanese phone manufacturer HTC since the two companies kissed and made up after their mid-2006 falling out. The latest model, the Argon, sports a 3.5in display.

Vonage has asked for a retrial in the patent case which the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone company lost to telco giant Verizon. The company wants the trial reheard in the light of a new Supreme Court ruling on patent law.

Fujitsu Services wants to buy GFI Informatique, the French reseller which wants to be bought by the private equity group Apax. So it is bypassing GFI's reseller's board to appeal directly to the company's shareholders.